I am Director of Entitlement and Budget Policy for the Heartland Institute, Senior Advisor for Entitlement Reform and Budget Policy at the National Tax Limitation Foundation, General Counsel for the American Civil Rights Union, and Senior Fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis. I served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under President George H.W. Bush. I am a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and the author most recently of America's Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb (New York: Harper Collins, 2011).
I write about new, cutting edge ideas regarding public policy, particularly concerning economics.

President Obama's Plan To "De-develop" America Shifts Into High Gear

This issue should be affecting now state political races between Democrats and Republicans for Governor, the legislature, and all other state offices. Let Democrats say vote for us and we will impose on you carbon taxes and cap and trade burdens under which your electricity costs will necessarily skyrocket. And let Republicans say vote for us and we will tell the Feds they can go to Hades.

Obamanomics: The De-development of America

It should be no surprise to anyone that President Obama’s economic policies have all but terminated any economic growth and opportunity in America. Because every one of those policies has been decisively anti- growth.

Obama has led increases in the top tax rates of virtually every major federal tax — income taxes, capital gains taxes, taxes on corporate dividends, death taxes, even payroll taxes. The only marginal tax rate he has not increased, the federal corporate tax rate, is already the highest in the world.

Obama has led massive increases in regulatory costs, burdens and barriers, from health care to finance to energy to see above.

Obama and his Administration have cheerled the Fed to pursue wild, zero interest rate monetary policies, buying up most national debt, for years now, laying the foundation for the future return of inflation.

The only pro-growth policy has been the sequester, and other cuts in spending, imposed on him, by the Republican House majority. But Obama is working mightily to reverse that, proposing to restore wild-eyed spending in every budget, and speech relating to the subject.

Some commenters have asserted that President Obama has failed to produce economic growth because Congressional Republicans refuse any compromise with him. But name any policy President Obama has proposed that would lead to more economic growth and jobs that Congressional Republicans have refused to support. You can’t, because there isn’t one. Some of you are so easy for professional politicians to fool.

The real explanation for what is going on here with Obamanomics was actually revealed years ago by the President’s Science advisor, John Holdren. Holdren said, “A massive campaign must be launched to…de-develop the United States…bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation….We must design a stable, low consumption economy in which there is a much more equitable distribution of wealth.”

And that is what you have with the President’s economic policies, a massive campaign to de-develop the United States. Even I have to say, if that is what the President’s plan is, it’s working.

For any other President engaged in this, we would have to impeach him for pursuing such a war on his own people. But in this case, Obama just represents the true heart and soul of his own party, which protects and enables him in this foolish endeavor. So the conclusion to take away: don’t blame President Obama, blame the Democrat Party, which you have a clear chance to do this fall.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

Comments

The author does not mention that Republicans decided in a documented 2009 meeting to reject any Obama initiated economic policy. If Obama was for it, they would be against it. So, the authors “Obama economy” rings rather hollow.

Mr. Koppenhoffer, Note that in 2009 and 2010 Democrats had filibuster proof majorities in Congress, so your point about Republican opposition is an invalid talking point. More important is my challenge in the article to name one proposal by Obama that would have increased growth or even jobs that was opposed by Republicans. You can’t.

As has been explained to you repeatedly, Heartland “Institute” anti-science PR firm “Senior Fellow” Peter Ferrara, that science denying claim of yours is false.

* All global temperature datasets, save for one of the satellite (lower atmosphere) temperature datasets (the RSS dataset), show surface and lower atmospheric global warming over the past 17+ years.

* Per the heads of the team that maintains the other satellite global temperature dataset (UAH) – prominent global warming “skeptics” Roy Spencer and John Christy – the RSS satellite global temperature dataset that shows no warming over the past 17 years is very likely biased against actual warming because it uses old satellites and uses a “model” that doesn’t correctly control for their orbital decay. http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/07/more-on-the-divergence-between-uah-and-rss-global-temperatures/

* Moreover most (over 90%) of global warming happens in the oceans in any event, and the oceans data shows warming over the past 17+ years too. http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/

———————— Republican Climate Scientist Dr. Barry Bickmore:

Anti-climate science propagandists are ‘Enemies of Democracy’

“I’ve recently been involved with other scientists and scholars in Utah trying to stop the spread of outright lies, half-truths, abuses of data, and distortions about climate change. Much of this disinformation is coming from (or through) some Republican members of the Utah Legislature, and the other Republican (and some Democratic) members have swallowed it hook, line, and sinker…

“In addition, I’m a Republican myself, and it galls me that my own party has locally fallen for a bunch of conspiracy theories and scientifically incompetent trash. In my opinion, something has to be done to save the party from disaster in the long run…

“Democracy depends on accurate information being readily available to the public, and I see people who propagate such disinformation campaigns as enemies of Democracy.”

Obama’s proposed EPA regulation will NOT decrease global CO2 levels. They won’t even keep them constant. It’s not the 1980′s anymore. China produces much more CO2 emissions than the US. In 2012 China’s CO2 emissions were 189% of the US (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions). It is worse today. The proposed regulation will result in more manufacturing leaving the US for China because of much higher electricity costs. In 2012, 78% of China’s electricity generation was from coal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_the_People’s_Republic_of_China). In 2011, only 37% of the United States electricity generation was from coal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_United_States). Coal fired plants in the United States are much cleaner than coal fired plants in China. Barrack Obama is lying again. He’s not at all interested in slowing down or preventing global warming. He is very interested in de-development of the United States.

It’s rather a shame that Forbes doesn’t have a “preview comment” feature. Let’s try again: ———

Peter Ferrara’s bio states that he writes about “public policy, particularly concerning economics,” yet he continues to write about science. And everything he writes about science is either grossly deceptive or just plain wrong.

Let’s take a look.

“[A]verage global temperatures have not risen in almost 18 years.

Flat-out false, and he knows it. According to Dr. Roy Spencer, an avowed skeptic of human-caused global warming (and a man revered by Ferrara, judging from past comments), the global temperature trend for the last 18 years is +0.98C/century. That’s insanely rapid warming by historical standards. Of all the major global datasets, the only one that shows no warming is RSS, which, as everyone including Spencer agrees, is no longer reliable because the orbit of the satellite it uses is decaying. So, of course, that’s the only one Ferrara uses.

But no honest, educated person can use the term “pollution” to refer to carbon dioxide emissions. For the easily manipulated, low information voters out there, carbon dioxide is not some toxic industrial gas.

Ironically, it’s those “low information voters” Ferrara is targeting. A substance does not have to be toxic to be a pollutant. It simply has to be artificially produced (say, by burning fossil fuels) and have a negative effect on the environment we live in. If artificially produced CO2 has a negative effect on our climate, then it is a pollutant by definition.

It is a natural substance essential for the survival of all life on the planet. Plants need CO2 to grow and conduct photosynthesis

Red herring. CO2 is plant food, but it’s not only plant food. It is also a powerful heat-trapping gas. The one has nothing to do with the other. And, in any event, plants got along just fine for hundreds of millions of years without us. They don’t need us to add more CO2 to the atmosphere to thrive.

We have now gone over eight years without a category 3-5 hurricane hitting the United States

Yes, if it doesn’t strike the US, it’s not a hurricane, and it’s not important. Everyone knows that.

There were fewer than half as many forest fires last year as during the 1960s and 1970s.

“Last year”? Classic case of trying to use data from a single year as if it meant something. It doesn’t. But it sure fools those darned “low information voters.”

And, by the way, the fires we do get are much larger than they used to be. The total acreage burned is increasing. Oddly, Ferrara doesn’t mention this. One wonders why (not really).

There’s still ice on Lake Superior – in June

Again: One year, one tiny region. Parts of the US were unusually cold last winter. Other parts of the world were unusually warm. See how that works, Peter? You can’t use regional weather to argue a point about global climate.

But these models, which have never been validated, meaning they cannot even predict the past

Simply false. In reality, climate models do this “hindcasting” quite well. That’s one of the reasons we know they’re pretty good.

[the models] are diverging farther and farther from real world temperatures

Only in the short term. In the 1990s, global temps were above than the projections. Now they’re running below the projections. This is because model project long-term, not short-term, trends. Ferrara is complaining that the models aren’t correctly predicting something that they don’t try to predict.

Global temperature records do not remotely track anywhere near rising carbon dioxide emissions over time

This is just insanely wrong. Anyone with two or more neurons to run together can look at a chart of CO2 vs temperature and see how wrong it is:

The cyclical up and down temperature patterns track much more closely instead with the natural cycles of ocean churning currents … and cycles of sunspots and other solar activity.

Hand-waving. Everyone understands that oceanic and solar cycles affect atmospheric temperature. But Ferrara can’t point to a single one of these cycles that can explain the overall increase in temperature over the last 50 years or so, and he knows it, which is why he doesn’t even try to. He’s appealing once again to those “low information voters.”

Those volumes are “double peer reviewed,” in that they discusses thousands of peer reviewed articles published in scientific journals, and are themselves peer reviewed

Ferrara has made this claim before. I asked him whether the NIPCC report was, in fact, peer-reviewed by independent, anonymous reviewers with appropriate scientific credentials.

Crickets.

If it wasn’t, then the report wasn’t peer-reviewed at all.

And the idea that a document is “double peer-reviewed” beacuse it discusses peer-reviewed papers is utter nonsense. If an amateur blogger writes a blog post about a peer-reviewed paper, is that blog post peer-reviewed? Obviously it is not. So how is the NIPCC report “double peer reviewed”? It’s not. In reality, it’s not even single peer-reviewed. The claim is a complete fabrication.

the Democrat Party

Peter, it’s the Democratic Party. I thought you said you attended Harvard. I am surprised to find that they failed to teach you the correct name of one of America’s two major political parties. Ask for a refund.

As Reagan used to say so often, “I didn’t leave the Democrat Party. The Democrat Party left me.”

No, he didn’t say that “so often.” In fact, he didn’t even say it once. That’s because, unlike you, Peter, Reagan knew the correct name of the Democratiic party. And he didn’t even go to Harvard!

Mr. Hoptoad, I am regularly in contact with Roy Spencer and he says he agrees with me not with you. He will be at the Climate Change conference in Las Vegas, where I will be speaking as well. You can talk to him there, as the conference is open to the public. Even alarmists are discussing the lack of warming for 18 years in the media. See the article on the subject in The Economist I reference in my articles. So I will not discuss these issues further on any basis other than there has been no warming for over 18 years now. The models used by the UN’s IPCC have been completely discredited by the real world temperature data. I dispute every other declarative statement in your post. Thorough sources documenting my statements are discussed in my article.

“Mr. Hoptoad, I am regularly in contact with Roy Spencer and he says he agrees with me”

I am sure you are in regular contact with him since he seems to be on the Heartland payroll now.

About your campaign to rewrite the global warming record. There has been no lack of warming for the past 18 years. That is a fossil fuel myth, fueled by PR outfits such as yours.

The global warming has never slowed down. The excess 250 trillion watts is mostly deposited into the oceans where it can be carried deep below by the circulating currents

It is the surface temperature, greatly influenced by the surface currents of the Pacific Ocean which has been retarded. It is the surface temperature which you are falsely using to represent the global climate system.

Also again here’s Dr. Spencer in his own words on why his UAH satellite dataset shows warming over the past 17+ years while the RSS satellite dataset that you Mr. Ferrara cherry-picked does not:

“My UAH cohort and boss John Christy, who does the detailed matching between satellites, is pretty convinced that the RSS data is undergoing spurious cooling because RSS is still using the old NOAA-15 satellite which has a decaying orbit, to which they are then applying a diurnal cycle drift correction based upon a climate model, which does not quite match reality. We have not used NOAA-15 for trend information in years…we use the NASA Aqua AMSU, since that satellite carries extra fuel to maintain a precise orbit.”

“John [Christy] works hard at making our dataset as good as it can be, and has correctly reminded me that he and others have several peer reviewed and published papers recent years on the subject of the accuracy of the UAH dataset…

“Based upon the evidence to date, it is pretty clear that (1) the UAH dataset is more accurate than RSS, and that (2) the RSS practice of using a climate model to correct for the effect of diurnal drift of the satellite orbits on the temperature measurements is what is responsible for the spurious behavior.”

I am regularly in contact with Roy Spencer and he says he agrees with me not with you.

Is that so? That’s really quite interesting, considering that his own data show warming over the last 18 years at the rate I quoted. You might ask him how he equates “warming at about 1C/century” (what his data say) and “no warming” (what you claim he says, although I can find no evidence that this is actually true). I would be most interested in that response. So would everyone else, I imagine. Quite a trick of mental gymnastics, that.

The models used by the UN’s IPCC have been completely discredited by the real world temperature data

Thank you for confirming that you don’t understand what climate models actually predict.

You are aware that the observed long-term temperature trends are well within the confidence limits of all of the first three IPCC projections, right? You must be, since I’ve already explained this to you (not that you ever bothered to respond).

The observant reader will notice that here in the comments section you have continued to plug Heartland propaganda literature and a Heartland propaganda conference, as well as to repeat repeatedly-debunked “skeptic” crapola (such as your oft-repeated “No global warming in 17+ years” anti-science crapola), while you continue to run away from answering the following question:

———————————– In your mind was the 2012 Heartland billboard ad campaign that compared those who believe in global warming to serial killers:

1. Scientifically justifiable?

-and-

2. Ethically justifiable?

Please answer each question with a “Yes” or “No” and for each “Yes” answer please explain why you think that what Heartland did is justifiable – thank you. ———————————–

You’ve been asked that question numerous times now, Mr. Ferrara – care to finally answer, or are you going to keep running away from the question?

Great article-thanks for continuing to write about subjects unpopular with those who believe wishful thinking is a plan. I agree Obama is doing a great job of following his plan to make everyone miserable except his private pay-pals as well as undermine the rule of law and individual rights. I can hardly wait until November to vote-I don’t like Republicans but Democrats have morphed into the new Marxists. The Democrats seem to hate everyone especially those who question the Dems “wisdom” on any policy.

For example, the non-scientist Mr. Ferrara again parrots the following repeatedly-debunked anti-science claim:

“[A]verage global temperatures have not risen in almost 18 years.”

As has been explained to Mr. Ferrera repeatedly, that science denying claim is false:

* All global temperature datasets, save for one of the satellite (lower atmosphere) temperature datasets (the RSS dataset), show surface and lower atmospheric global warming over the past 17+ years.

* Per the heads of the team that maintains the other satellite global temperature dataset (UAH) – prominent global warming “skeptics” Roy Spencer and John Christy – the RSS satellite global temperature dataset that shows no warming over the past 17 years is very likely biased against actual warming because it uses old satellites and uses a “model” that doesn’t correctly control for their orbital decay. http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/07/more-on-the-divergence-between-uah-and-rss-global-temperatures/

* Moreover most (over 90%) of global warming happens in the oceans in any event, and the oceans data shows warming over the past 17+ years too. http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/

————————- * “The Gish Gallop, named after creationist Duane Gish, is the debating technique of drowning the opponent in such a torrent of half-truths, lies, and straw-man arguments that the opponent cannot possibly answer every falsehood in real time.” http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop

@msmox: If you look carefully, you will see that all the negative comments posted on this article so far are about Ferrara’s twisted “science.” They have nothing to do with politics, policy, Republicans, Democrats, Marxists, or Obama.

If he’s wrong about the science, then none of the rest of it matters. And he is wrong about the science. Essentially every sentence in the article that relates to global warming is either deceptive or just plain false.

And he refuses to discuss any of it. When he bothers to reply at all, he just repeats his assertions.

You’ve been asked that question numerous times now, Mr. Ferrara – care to finally answer, or are you going to keep running away from the question?

Publicola, that’s an easy one. He’s not going to answer your question. He never really addresses anything that’s said to him. When he deigns to respond at all, he just repeats his claims without defending them. But mostly he just won’t respond because, as he’s said repeatedly, he “doesn’t work for us.” And that is the one thing he’s said that is actually true. He doesn’t work for us. He works for an “institute” that labors to support the very industries that are causing all this. He doesn’t need to back up, with actual science, anything he says. He just needs to say it. That’s all his job entails.

magnificent goods from you, man. I’ve understand your stuff previous to and you’re just extremely excellent. I really like what you’ve acquired here, certainly like what you are stating and the way in which you say it. You make it enjoyable and you still care for to keep it sensible. I cant wait to read far more from you. This is really a tremendous website. HSC Result 2015

I think you will find that Obama IS NOT looking out for the best interest of the U.S.A. The Muslims have a practice called “al taqiyyah.” It encourages Muslims to lie, deceive or misrepresent to infidels in order to further Islam’s goal of world domination. One has to be open to the idea that barack hussein obama might actually be a closet Muslim … well, semi-closet, anyway.

If we survive all 8 years of Obama, or less if by some miracle November goes that good and he is impeached, we’ll survive. The only thing that will cause this Republic to fold in short order is the acceleration of the normalization of what the America truly believes is our political center. When reality happens, and it most certainly will, our Department of Justice will no longer provide cover for the then has been who almost single handid destroyed the Democratic Party.

The good news is that Americans who were sliding to the left like a frog in a frying pan of water brought slowly to a boil, and without a true right for ever leftward lurching left, the cold hard reality that took down communism a decade or so ago would have done us in too.

Think about this…

The true center of America is framework of government, the U.S. Constitution. When ratified in 1787 we began the process of creating hundreds of thousands of laws to hang the mechanisms by which we are governed. A propensity to build up the military, not a popular notion when the Constitution was being debated, indicates a right wing or conservative lean; A propensity to go to the federal government and rule the nation from our nation’s seat of federal power in Washington DC indicated liberal or left wing tendencies. The true center of America is where we started, not left or right of what the general public feels the political center is.

For all the damage he has done, Obama has done something that wasn’t getting done and didn’t look like it would ever materialize… he woke up millions of Americans who are reading their Constitution, engaging in grassroots political movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Movements. Yes, even the Occupy Movement had more of a positive effect on pinching us awake, despite the pain of watching hippies pooping on cop cars as they vainly attempted to re-create Arab Spring in New York City.

We all lose if our political parties continue the slide to continue the expansion of what is left of this Republic into an Empire ruled by the ruling class that no amount of money or clever accounting can ever hope to contain, let alone fix. Repeal the 17th Amendment, push power and experiments in self governance x 50 back to the states, and most importantly… poison the well of big government by using it to help correct the effects they have had on the free market. For example if we frooze the Department of Education in place with hiring and funding and traded bureaucrats and things like Common Core for technicians and server farms to offer free education to all U.S. citizens so that the cost of an education would be kept in check despite Obama’s attempts to shower his biggest fans with federal pork. When it levels out after the unstoppable explosion of workers better trained and educated for a modern work force, simply get rid of the new DOE or cut it back and use it like hunting licenses to manage deer populations.

We can do this and we will be able to thank Obama when it’s all said and done, or it won’t matter at all. This nation without it’s founding principles of self governance is neither special nor likely to do more than continue down the paths of all of the Empires before us. He’ll either be the man who saved America by almost destroying it, or the first of many egotistical and narcissistic power mongers who will hand us the fate of Rome that struggled for hundreds of years as reality pounded down her gates and looted her until nothing was left but the dark ages that preceded the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment… Rinse and repeat.

One has to be politically lobotomized in order to fail to see that the political intent of this (climate) lie is to destroy what’s left of the American middle class. For the EPA to declare CO2 a “dangerous pollutant” and the supreme court agreement with this lie is to declare the unilateral authority to raise commodity prices at will. It is not the wealthy that will fee the effects of suck enforced hike in the cost of living but rather the poor whom will become poorer and the middle class who will join the poor. We will then have an impoverished America rulled by a minority elite, much the same as in Muslim countries (or cheap labor populous demographics like China and India). Welcome to the new Americistan led by Obama.

Actually, one has to be politically lobotomized in order to ignore a hundred fifty years of physics, the overwhelming view of the world’s most expert climate scientists, and warnings from literally every national science academy on the planet in favor of some gigantic, decades-long, international conspiracy to “destroy what’s left of the American middle class.”

This is a perfect example of lazy empirical/historical analysis of an economic issue. The fact that at some distance past our economy was growing at a healthy rate and that coincided with the gold standard is not economic analysis. The same period of economic growth coincided with having segregate schools, using horses for transportation, or not having color television. Our economy has a completely different structure than what we had since WWII. There is no baby boom, there is competition for resources, competition for markets, competition for brain power. The US had the world under its control as WWII and to think that such a word will comeback is a dream.

Next, the author fails to see that this recession was a deep financial recession the like of which we last saw in 1939, and we know how that turned out. Obama administration has made a number of mistakes, but ignoring the fact that this was another typical recession shows one of two things. An ignorant author or someone who is trying to sell the religion of gold at any price (perhaps because he is paid by some gold nut).

By the way, I have a simple question: Would gold standard still work, if gold was a dark brown and dull metal? Just wondering.

magnificent goods from you, man. I’ve understand your stuff previous to and you’re just extremely excellent. I really like what you’ve acquired here, certainly like what you are stating and the way in which you say it. You make it enjoyable and you still care for to keep it sensible. I cant wait to read far more from you. This is really a tremendous website.